Microsoft Teams grants you the ability to provide Guest access to your organization for various uses. It could be that you want an individual to have the ability to call you inside the app, or that they will be helping out with a particular project inside your organization. Whatever the reason, this article will cover how Guest access works and how you can add and manage Guest users inside Microsoft Teams.

Adding Guest Users

Note: In order to be able to add Guests to a Team, your organization administrator must first enable guest access – by default this option is set to off. If you’re not sure whether this is enabled or not then contact your Office 365 Administrator

Follow these steps in order to add a guest user to a Team. Repeat these steps for each Team that you wish this user to have access to.

  • Open the Microsoft Teams app on your PC, navigate to the Teams section, right-click on the Team you want to add a user to then click Add member
  • Enter the email address of the user you’ll be adding, you should see a drop-down appear that allows you to add the user as a guest, click that drop-down then click the Add button
  • You should see the user appear and be marked as a guest now, click Done in the bottom right corner to close the Add member window
  • The user will receive an email from Microsoft Teams that they’ve been added as a Guest to your Team – they will need to click the link enable their access and complete the set up on their end

If the Guest is already a user of Office 365 then they can use their existing account to sign into your organizations team. If they do not already have an Office 365 account then they will be prompted to create one and set a password, afterwards they’ll be able to use that new account to access your team.

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Removing Guests from a Team

If you’ve previously granted access to a Guest in a team and you wish to revoke that, follow these instructions.

  • Open the Microsoft Teams app on your PC, navigate to the Teams section, right-click on the Team you want to remove the guest from and then click Manage team
  • Make sure on the Manage team window you have Members selected, then find the user under the Members and guests section and click the X icon to remove them from the team

This will prevent a guest from accessing your organizations team. If you ever need to restore access you can simply add them again.

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Accessing external Teams as a Guest

If you’ve been added as a Guest to another organizations team, then you should know how to switch and interact with another Team through the app. There are certain limitations for Guests as these types of user accounts are not intended for long-term usage – if a user is going to be a permanent member of your organization then they should have a fully licensed user account to avoid issues.

  • First, you’ll need to accept the invitation to join the external Team (if you haven’t already)
  • If you don’t have already use an Office 365 account / Teams then you’ll be prompted to set a password and verify your email. Follow the instructions to complete this
  • You’ll be directed to the Microsoft Teams website where it will prompt you if you want to install / launch the desktop app. If you have any issues initially accessing this new Team as a guest then we recommend using the web app to access this new team for the first time
  • If you were an existing Teams user you will now have multiple organizations to select from in the app. This menu is found in the top-right of the desktop app or in the hamburger menu when using the mobile app (see screenshots). You are limited to viewing a single organization at a time in the app, if you need to access more than one then you can use a combination of the web app (https://teams.microsoft.com) and the desktop/mobile app separately

When accessing another organization as a Guest virtually everything is the same from a functionality perspective. You can chat, call, access files, etc as you normally would however there are specific limitations imposed on these accounts – for a full list of their abilities and limitations please view this table from Microsoft

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That should cover the most common Guest user activity inside Microsoft Teams. If we missed anything or you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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